The Blackbird

Twenty-Three

Grofield sighed in animal pleasure and threw the empty Spam can away. He scrubbed his hands clean in the snow, dried them as best he could on the blanket he had wrapped around himself, and put his gloves back on. “That,” he said, “was good.”

“Murm,” she said.

It was pitch black, he couldn’t see her at all. He said, “What was that?”

“My mouth wur full,” she said, sounding as though it still was.

“Oh,” he said. “Let me know when you’re done, so we can talk.”

“Murm.”

They were sitting side by side in the darkness, both wrapped in blankets, their backs against the skimobile. While Vivian had held the flashlight he’d checked the machine out and found it still in good shape. Then he’d gathered the supplies together again, opened a few cans, and they’d sat down here to eat and rest.

It seemed there were fewer stars now, one whole segment of sky was now lightless, and the remainder didn’t give enough light to matter. Far away across the lake the lights of the lodge looked like more stars, tiny and dim. The fire had died down over there now, there was no longer any redness to relieve the black at all.

“There!” she said. “That was good.”

“You’re done?”

“My hands are sticky.”

“Clean them in the snow.”

After a little silence she said, “Now they’re wet.”

“Dry them on your blanket.”

Another little silence, and she said, “Fine.” She touched his shoulder. “Would you mind if I leaned my head on you?”

“Can you talk with your head leaning?”

“Sure. You want to talk?”

“Definitely,” he said.

Her head leaned against his shoulder. “All right. What do you want to talk about?”

“What’s going on,” he said.

“I’m sitting here with my head on your shoulder.”

He didn’t say anything.

She lifted her head, and he could tell she was trying to look at him in the darkness. She said, “Not funny?”

“Not funny,” he agreed. “Mostly because I don’t know how much time we have before that plane gets back. If they’re only going as far as that lake we started from, they can do the round trip in two hours.”

“All right,” she said. “I don’t know where the canisters are, I can’t help you with that.”

“I’m not ready to talk about the canisters yet,” he said. “I want to start a heck of a lot earlier than that. Like this meeting. Tell me about it.”

“There’s nothing to tell. They came to bid for the canisters. Naturally, it was supposed—”

“Wait a second,” Grofield said. “The canisters were for sale? They were being auctioned off?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Who was doing the selling?”

“The people who had them.”

“Come on, Vivian.”

“Well, I’m sorry, that’s who. They belonged to the United States Army to begin with, they were stolen from a storage depot somewhere in the States. Four Army men took them.”

“American Army men?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Where are these four guys?”

“At the lodge. If they aren’t dead now.”

“I didn’t see any Americans there,” Grofield said. “I was the only one.”

“That’s what’s so charming about people like you,” she said, some of the old coldness coming back into her voice. “You were the only white American there.”

“They’re Negroes? Four Negro soldiers?”

“What’s the matter?”

“That shakes me a little,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“These days black men are supposed to be the heroes,” he explained. “Never mind, let’s hear the rest.”

“There is no rest. They stole the canisters, they arranged for this place this weekend, they contacted nine governments—”

“I was told seven.”

“American intelligence isn’t infallible,” she said drily. “Believe me, nine were invited and nine showed up.”

“All Third World?”

“Naturally. And all unimportant enough so their leaders could safely travel incognito to a meeting in Canada.”

“Why the leaders? Why not send representatives with power to purchase?”

“I can’t speak for any other government,” she said, “but I know my Colonel Rahgos wouldn’t dare send anyone in his place to a meeting like this. Have that man return with a weapon like that, and with new contacts among the leaders of other nations? Colonel Rahgos became president of Undurwa after the army revolted and beheaded the last president, and most of the other leaders at this meeting came to power in similar ways, and they know just how tempting it would be for a representative here to go home and decide to take his president’s place at home, too.”

“Assuming his was the government that made the high bid,” Grofield pointed out.

“What? Oh no, there wasn’t to be only one high bidder. Price was to be discussed, each government was to decide how much it wanted, and everyone would get a part. There’s enough in those four canisters to kill everyone on earth forty times.”

“That’s lovely,” Grofield said. “What a goddamn sweet thing for everybody to be playing with.”

“No one liked it,” she said. “But no one could refuse the invitation. One never knows who will be one’s friend tomorrow. What if Colongel Rahgos had decided not to come, not to bid, not to buy? One of the other purchasers is Dhaba, and we share a three-hundred-mile border with Dhaba. A lot of that border has never been exactly defined, and no one knows for sure what might yet be found in that area. Metals, or oil, or merely fertile land for our expanding population. We don’t as yet have a border dispute with Dhaba, but everyone knows it will happen someday. Can we afford to let Dhaba have a weapon we can’t match? Particularly one as devastating as this.”

“All right,” Grofield said. “I see the way it runs.”

“We would all rather spend the money elsewhere,” she said. “Some of us on schools, others on yachts. No one wants to bring home a sealed metal jar full of death, costing more than one citizen’s average annual income for a thousand years, knowing we will only put it on a shelf and never use it. But we have to, we have no choice. As long as it’s available, we have to get our share.”

“Goody,” Grofield said. “But why the whole weekend? And why all those hotel reservations down in Quebec, if the main event is up here?”

“We were to gather in Quebec,” she said, “and then be brought up here. The people selling don’t trust anyone any more than they have to, so no one knew exactly where the meeting would take place until we were all brought up here. And the deal was to have been completed tomorrow morning. Most of us would have been back in Quebec by tomorrow night, and there was going to be a conference the next day, on Sunday. The different leaders had a lot of things to discuss, spheres of influence, temporary partnerships against other nations, our relationships with the major powers, things like that. That would have been done on Sunday. Then on Monday everyone would go home. A few people would have stayed up here until then, including you.”

“Why?”

“We couldn’t let you go until everything was finished and we were all on our way home.”

“Why were the other people going to stay here?”

“It was agreed the sellers would stay here until Monday. We didn’t want them betraying us, announcing to the American or Canadian authorities about what we were carrying with us.”

“Everybody trusts everybody,” Grofield said.

“All the trusters are dead,” she said.

“I believe you. All right, let me think for a minute.”

“Go right ahead,” she said.

He went right ahead, but without pleasure. All his thoughts were depressing.

Given what Vivian had told him, he could fill in most of the rest for himself. These bucket-shop plutocrats, Rahgos and Pozos and the other colonels and generals, not used to secrecy at the big time level, had left tracks in the sand and some of the bigger predators had come wandering by. The Americans had found out that something was going on, but not what, and had shipped Grofield in here real quick to get the details. And somebody else — Russia, maybe, or China, or maybe France, Egypt, Israel, Argentina, you name it — had also become aware of all the activity, and had tried more direct means of gaining its information, such as kidnapping Grofield and planning to inject him with truth serum.

He said, “Are you missing anybody from your party? Anybody lost, strayed, or stolen?”

“Not that I know of,” she said. “Before tonight, you mean.”

“Before coming up here.”

“No.”

“Somebody did, I bet,” he said. “They got to somebody from one of the national groups, the way they tried to get to me, and they found out what was going on, and they came up here to get the goodies for themselves.”

“But who are they?”

“I don’t know. They speak a language I don’t recognize. One of them was with a Free Quebec organization, but this deal is on a higher order of insanity than that.”

“They’re the ones who killed your friend?”

“Hardly my friend. But they’re the ones, you’re right. They sure do believe in direct action. But I don’t know how they expect to get away with this stunt. Are they just going to bump off the presidents of nine different countries?”

“Why not?” she said. “There are men in every one of those capital cities just hoping and praying their leader doesn’t return from this trip. By Tuesday there will be nine bloodless revolutions, nine deposed presidents, whereabouts unknown, and most of it won’t even get into the world’s newspapers.”

“Better and better,” Grofield said.

“It’s up to us to get those canisters,” she said.

He tried to look at her, even though he couldn’t see a thing. “Are you out of your mind? That lodge is crawling with armed men. Do you know where the canisters are?”

“No. No one knows but the four Americans.”

“Fine. So we’d have to go over to the lodge and round up one of the Americans and get him to tell us where the canisters are. Then we’d have to go get them and take them away. All without being seen or stopped by the guys from the airplane. Frankly, Vivian, I have my doubts.”

Urgently she said, “But we don’t know who they are! We don’t know what they plan to do with the canisters. Maybe fly over New York City and Washington and London and Paris and drop them. None of us would have done anything like that, none of us would have had the reason or the desire to do it, or enough to do it even if we wanted to. We would have kept it as a defense, a warning, a kind of ultimatum. The same way the Americans keep it. But we don’t know who these other people are or what they want to do. And they seem to choose killing more often than not.”

“I’d rather not give them the chance,” Grofield said, “of choosing to kill me. If you don’t mind. I have no objection to playing the fool in order to save the world, but not if I don’t have the slightest chance of surviving or of doing anybody any good.”

“But we have to try! What else are you going to do?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, “and it seems to me the only sensible thing for me to do is get on my trusty skimobile and head south at first light. What that plane can do in one hour I should be able to do in four or five in my skimobile, and maybe even before then I’ll come to a settlement or something with a telephone. Or a radio, I’m not picky. Then I’ll call good old Ken in Quebec and tell him the story and tell him to send the Marines up to the snowy North Woods and put the arm on the baddies.”

“They’ll be gone long before that,” she said angrily, “and you know it. That isn’t any good, you know it isn’t any good.”

“I know,” Grofield agreed gloomily. “It isn’t any good. But boy, it’s what I want to do.”

“We have to think of something else.”

He sighed. “All right. How many people know where these canisters are?”

“Just the four Americans,” she said.

“And they’re somewhere around the lodge? Inside one of the buildings?”

“I don’t think so. The impression I got was that they were hidden somewhere not very far away, but not exactly at the lodge.”

“All right. Do you know what these four Americans look like?”

“Yes.”

“All four of them? You could point them out to me?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay.” He got reluctantly to his feet. “Let’s have some light,” he said. “We have to reorganize our supplies.”

The flashlight clicked on, and in its pale light he saw her frowning at him in cautious hope. “You have an idea?”

“We can call it an idea,” he said, folding his blanket.

“What is it?”

“I’m not telling you.”

She was astonished. “Why not?”

“Because I’m not sure you’d approve,” he said.